Black Hat USA 2014: Breaking Stuff Is Fun

Black Hat events cover the entire spectrum of information security topics, but it's hard to deny that our programming on good, old-fashioned vulnerabilities is among the most immediately exciting. It is, after all, fun to break things (and if they're important things, all the better). Today's four highlighted Black Hat Briefings focus on exploits, exploits, and more exploits. Enjoy.

Wireless systems and their radio signals are everywhere: consumer, corporate, government, amateur -- widely deployed and often vulnerable. If you have ever wondered what sort of information is buzzing around you, Hacking the Wireless World with Software Defined Radio -- 2.0 will introduce how you can dominate the RF spectrum by "blindly" analyzing any signal, and then begin reverse engineering it from the physical layer up using open-source software and cheap hardware. The applications are nearly endless. If you have any SDR equipment, bring it along.

Because patching all vulnerabilities for a modern, complex software system is difficult due to bug volume and response-time requirements, software vendors usually devise quick workarounds to mitigate the exploitation of a given vulnerability. But those patches are sometimes incomplete, so attackers can utilize different attack vectors to re-exploit the patched vulnerability. Exploiting Unpatched iOS Vulnerabilities for Fun and Profit will do just this in iOS 7.1.1, exploiting previously patched vulnerabilities to run unsigned code with root permissions and defeat mandatory code signing.

"Human hacking" -- the social engineering of employees, contractors, and other trusted persons -- is an ever-present threat to enterprises, with financial institutions in particular seeing a significant increase in account takeover attacks by sophisticated fraudsters socially engineering call-center agents. Lifecycle of a Phone Fraudster: Exposing Fraud Activity from Reconnaissance to Takeover Using Graph Analysis and Acoustical Anomalies will show how acoustical anomalies can be utilized to detect more than 80% of such calls, with only a 2% error rate. Come see how these advanced detection techniques can be used to track the lifecycle of these fraudsters as they worm their way through the call center's human infrastructure.

Many mobile devices use touch-based sequences to enhance security, and these tend to be hard to observe and decipher by most bystanders. But in My Google Glass Sees Your Passwords, Xinwen Fu and Zhen Ling will demonstrate a new Google Glass-based attack that uses sophisticated computer vision techniques to recognize more than 90% of tapped mobile passcodes from three meters away. They'll also demonstrate one possible countermeasure, their randomized-layout Privacy Enhancing Keyboard (PEK).

Published: 2017-05-09NScript in mpengine in Microsoft Malware Protection Engine with Engine Version before 1.1.13704.0, as used in Windows Defender and other products, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (type confusion and application crash) via crafted JavaScript code within ...

Published: 2017-05-08unixsocket.c in lxterminal through 0.3.0 insecurely uses /tmp for a socket file, allowing a local user to cause a denial of service (preventing terminal launch), or possibly have other impact (bypassing terminal access control).

Published: 2017-05-08Improper checks for unusual or exceptional conditions in Brocade NetIron 05.8.00 and later releases up to and including 06.1.00, when the Management Module is continuously scanned on port 22, may allow attackers to cause a denial of service (crash and reload) of the management module.

Published: 2017-05-08Nextcloud Server before 11.0.3 is vulnerable to an inadequate escaping leading to a XSS vulnerability in the search module. To be exploitable a user has to write or paste malicious content into the search dialogue.